Saddle Club Super Edition 1 – A Summer Without Horses

Bonnie Bryant's A Summer Without Horses is a Saddle Club story for 9 year olds about a promise that turns out to be very hard to keep.

What happens

Fair warning about where it sits. This is the first of the Saddle Club Super Editions, the longer specials, so it doesn't read like a beginning. The club is long since formed, the girls talk about adventures we never see, and they already know a film star. Your reader will pick it up inside a page, but they aren't starting at the start.

Here's the set-up. Stevie slides down a tree branch in front of her three brothers and bruises her coccyx. She can't sit down. If you can't sit down you can't ride, and the doctor says three weeks.

Carole, trying to be kind, says none of them should ride until Stevie can. Lisa, who tells the story, keeps quiet while she works out how to get out of it, then makes it much worse by suggesting a forfeit. If any one of them rides, they all have to invite Veronica diAngelo into the club.

Veronica is the snobbiest, vainest girl in the county. Nobody's going to break that pact.

Then Lisa's mum takes her to Los Angeles to see her great-aunt Alison, and two things happen at once. Alison turns out to have been a horse-mad girl in Montana who rode bareback before dawn to watch the sun come up. And Skye Ransom, the film star, gets a surprise day off and offers Lisa a horse.

The Hollywood half is good fun. A limousine, a restaurant full of photographers, and a co-star so phoney he tells a reporter about weeping in a blacked-out shower to prepare for a scene.

The part that stays with you is Alison, who tells Lisa that horses stay in the bloodstream for ever and she won't outgrow them, whatever grown-ups say.

Two things a parent might want to know. Alison is very ill and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. Lisa works out on the way there that her mum has come to say goodbye. Some of it also feels distinctly of another era. A grown man's teenage date is described by her dress and her plans for plastic surgery, and Lisa writes her off as an airhead.

What to read next

If your reader takes to the three of them, Before They Rode Horses is in the library. Left in charge of the stable for a day, they each have to tell a true story from their own life instead of talking horses.